wherein Liz is annoyed at her seasonal job

[edenfalling]

Today is my first day back at Not the IRS, the tax prep company I do seasonal work for. It's a two-hour shift and absolutely nothing is going to happen, because nobody has their tax documents yet, but it's January so we're open just in case. (Very occasionally we do get somebody who's received a tax notice of some sort and wants advice, or somebody dropping by to schedule an appointment for February, but that's about it.)

Not the IRS has always blocked various websites on their office computers. Some of that is for electronic security reasons, but mostly it's to stop people from websurfing when we could be doing company-approved things instead.

This year, they have blocked Gmail. Not Google itself -- search engines are too necessary for research to block -- but all ancillary services associated with Google are unavailable.

They tried this a couple years ago but backed off when people screamed bloody murder about losing access to personal communications. I guess now they figure everyone has a smartphone so they can get away with it? In any case, this means I can't email writing projects to myself anymore, to pick at during my downtime. *sigh* I guess I can make private Dreamwidth posts and write in those, but that's such a pain.

...

In other news, church went well! We have a new adding machine (to replace the one that broke last week) so I and my partner got the offering counted efficiently and I was back in the kitchen before too many dirty dishes had piled up. It was also a small service, which undoubtedly helped on that front. I brought banana bread, which was devoured appreciatively. :)

Now I am going to poke around some proprietary software to get a feel for this tax season's updates, after which I may try writing or I may just pull out my Kindle and see what I have stored on there that's currently unfinished.

Comments

[redwolf]

Gah! I feel for you with the blocked interwebs. A few years back we had a security manager who'd come from the Prisons department who pretty much still had the mindset of lock everything down. This makes sense if your users are prisoners, not so much if you're a business. Even less if a large chunk of your business users are the IT department who actually need access to Google and Github and the like.

We had super dumb logic like wanting to block all social media (people are still going to access it via their phones to waste time, but now you can't monitor how much time they're wasting) but wanting social media feeds on the company web sites. To see those feeds, you need access to social media. Security refused to make an exception for the call centre guys who would otherwise see a broken chunk of code on the home page and really need to know if it's a broken thing that needs to be fixed, so the social media feed thing on the site was binned. Or the CEO wants to send a link his terrible video addressing the minions, except Youtube and Vimeo are blocked, because Security. ::headdesk::

This stupidity has been slowly getting dismantled, but it's taking years. Last hold out is the FTP block on external sites, which is majorly inconvenient as I need to access external third party servers weekly to manage outage messages. For reasons that baffle me, the corporate LAN blocks external FTP access, but if I switch to the guest network, I suddenly have access. The stupid, it burns.

google.com/mail and gmail.com will get you to Gmail, but unfortunately, it redirects to the mail.google.com subdomain, which is blocked. I was going to suggest a possible tech heavy workaround of running Gmail via a custom domain, but mine also redirects to the mail.google.com subdomain. While I set up the subdomain ages, I don't actually use it to notice that it now redirects. This is probably a global change to major corporate email providers as we switched to Outlook at work and webmail access is via outlook.office.com rather than the corporate URL of our previous provider. Sorry, I am not helpful today.

[edenfalling]

There is not always any identifiable logic to which sites get blocked and which are fine. Like, blocking the computers from reading USBs is fine and makes sense -- that is an easy way to keep people from accidentally transferring malware onto the company network and/or transferring our own secure documents off company computers. And arguably blocking YouTube makes sense since not everyone will have headphones and streaming video does eat bandwidth. But blocking Gmail is just petty.

And yeah, it's the mail.google.com subdomain that's blocked. Since Google redirects all attempts to reach Gmail to that subdomain, no joy finding a workaround. *sigh*